Hyde Park

Piñata Diplomacy has again shown itself to be what it is: a brightly-coloured donkey filled with cheap bits of logic that perpetuate opinions found on CNN and FOX News. First, it was Kreitner’s piece on Mumbai tragedy whereby he fell into supporting Bush’s war on terror. Then not surprisingly, his opinion on the recent Gaza incident reeks just the same. From now on, I have committed myself to publicly smash this Piñata every week with all my might and expose what truly lies inside it: dirt! I will start with his latest piece on Gaza.

First, let us put everything into context. Since 1948, the Palestinians have been forcefully driven out of their home. They have been colonized in all senses of word. Thus, an oppressed people have the right to resist their occupiers with all means up to an armed struggle. The Palestinians have the right to fight against Israeli imperialism as much as the Americans fought against the British imperialism with guns in the American Revolutionary War more than 200 years ago.

Now, if we start from this premise – that it is the Palestinians who are the oppressed and the Israeli government who is the oppressor – then we shouldn’t even take the Israeli government’s words seriously that they are “defending their citizens,” “fighting fundamentalism,” “avoiding civilians casualties,” etc. Throughout the history of wars, all aggressors always try to paint themselves as the victims and the victims as the aggressors.

With that being said, with the interest of the genuine liberation of Palestinians in mind, I will have to criticize the indiscriminate rocket method of Hamas (and other individual terrorism methods which have been used by Hamas, and the PLO in the 1970s), but not from a hypocritical moralistic point of view as the international community has done. I criticize it because this method is not effective and counter-productive. First, it is not even denting the military might of the oppressors. Secondly and most importantly, it actually pushes the Israeli masses to the hand of the Zionist reactionaries who are using these attacks as a pretext for their rabid imperialist agenda.

There is a section of Israeli masses who are opposed to their imperialist government, who are trying to pry away their brothers and sisters from the chauvinist demagogue of their government. The rocket attacks surely are not helping the cause of these anti-war Israelis. In Israel, daily demonstrations against the war have been taking place, a fact that most media and Kreitner fail to mention. Maybe it is because of the “minimal research” Kreitner has done on this topic as he himself admitted. My dad always told me: if you have nothing better to say you should just shut your mouth, or else you will just be spreading ignorance.

The Palestinian masses and the Israeli masses fundamentally have a common enemy: the Israeli imperialist government. On one side, it plunges its own people into an unending war on terror designed to subdue any dissent at home, and on the other, it continues to oppress Palestinians after 60 years. Understanding this starting point, we won’t fall into Ricky’s cheap reactionary logics. We have to be able to wade through the chauvinist clouds that have been thrown around by the Israeli government (and their friends in Washington, Ottawa, etc.) equally by the fundamentalist Hamas (and Hezbollah, Iranian regime, etc.). Just as much as there are Israelis who are fighting against the imperialist policy of their government, there are Palestinians who are fighting against the growing fundamentalism in their own backyard – if they have one left.

I will state this bluntly: a revolution by the Israeli workers that overthrows the imperialist government of Israel will be required for the solution of the Israel-Palestine problem. The only other alternative is a mutual genocide – take your pick.

Ted Sprague is a Master’s II student in Chemistry. You can reach him at ted_sprague@yahoo.com.

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